Hot moves: how a Glasgow venue harvests heat from dancers

The Bodyheat system at warehouse venue SWG3 captures heat from the audience and funnels it 200 metres below ground to a layer of bedrock that acts like a thermal battery

In 2019, Andrew Fleming-Brown realised that the venue he manages in Glasgow, called SWG3, a collection of industrial warehouses designed for holding tobacco, not people", was falling behind when it came to sustainability. Then he had an idea: We realised that our audiences could be our source of energy."

He recruited inventor David Townsend and his company TownRock Energy to investigate greening the complex and, in just over a year, they developed and built Bodyheat: a system that provides carbon-free climate control by storing heat from SWG3's visitors.